We have organised dinners and canapé receptions with entertainment and speakers.

On Saturday 22nd October there’s a evening party hosted by Tatler’s Wines; free parking available.

We will be announcing more events and activities up until the 17th August. Then a downloadable calendar will be available here and printed calendars will be distributed by our partners and through LGBTI media and venues throughout Australia.

ACON is just one of the LGBTI organisations set to benefit from Pokolbin Pride 2016

Matty and I were on our way back from a camping trip and visiting his Mum and Dad in northern NSW our first real ‘holiday’ since we moved to the Hunter Valley in July 2016.

We were chatting away about how proud we were of what we’d accomplished and sharing our mutual frustration that we hadn’t really spent enough time cultivating new friendships in our new home.

It was the weekend of Lovedale Long Lunch which sees up to 20,000 people a day visit seven wineries in the Hunter Valley.

“There should be a LLL for the gays” said Matty innocently “then we’d make some new friends”.

When we first launched the Facebook group ‘Pokolbin Pride‘ we both thought we’d end up hosting a lunch sometime at our restaurant, Nanna Kerr’s Kitchen, and connecting with some of the LGBTI locals that we knew were out and about but we just hadn’t met them yet.

What happened next was astonishing…

Overnight we gained about 400 followers, mainly locals, all voicing their excitement that someone was creating a gay and lesbian festival in the Hunter Valley

Not really knowing what to do next we said we’d announce the details of the festival when we hit 3000 followers (we thought this would kick the project into the long grass for a bit)

About 10 days later we’d notched up about 3100 followers

True to our word we’d did a quick sense check of what else was going on in the valley in the spring and found a ‘clean’ weekend (20th to 24th October 2016)

We now have a five day festival of LGBTI events and activities being hosted by us and a collection of other businesses in the Hunter Valley running as a social enterprise

Our ‘corporate’ kicked in and we created a survey to ask our audience what they wanted from a regional LGBTI event and we’ve shared the results with business community – Cessnock Council threw a business networking event so that we could share the story and more than 100 people showed up.

The outcome is that we’ve put together a calendar of events that the community said they wanted – this won’t be a Sydney Mardi Gras in the vines.